Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [13]
The counterman thought about it. “Try Phil Di Angelo,” he suggested. “You can most times find him down at the fourth pier, or at the Blue Moon, it’s a bar down there.”
Garrison thanked him and left. He tried the docks and didn’t find Di Angelo. In the Blue Moon the bartender pointed to a dark, unshaven man sitting alone with a bottle of beer at a table in the back. Garrison carried his suitcase across the dirty floor and sat down near Di Angelo. The man looked up. He had been drinking, Garrison saw, but he was not drunk.
“You’ve got a boat for hire,” Garrison said.
Di Angelo looked at him. “You wanta hire her?”
“I might. Is she fast?”
“Fast and trim. The fishing’s so-so now, not too good and not too bad. You won’t get a sail, if that’s what you’re looking for. No sail and no tarpon. We might have some fun.”
“I don’t fish.”
“No?” Di Angelo’s eyes were shrewd, appraising. “Go on, man.”
Garrison said “I want to go to Cuba. Havana.”
“You crazy?”
“No.”
“You must be crazy.”
Garrison didn’t say anything. He waited for Di Angelo to make up his mind.
“I could do it, man. It’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“A grand.”
Garrison sighed. He stood up and started to leave.
“Hey—”
“It’s too much,” he said.
“How much, then?”
“Half,” Garrison said. “Five hundred, no more.”
Di Angelo tried to haggle but it didn’t work. “All right,” he said finally. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Jesus, it takes time. It takes a hell of a time. You can’t just—”
“It’s a ninety-mile trip and it takes a couple of hours. Cut the crap.”
“There’s boats,” Di Angelo said desperately. “Patrol boats, ours and theirs. You can’t just dodge them.”
“You’re going to fly over their heads?”
For a few more minutes they sat and stared at each other. Then Di Angelo said: “All right, you’re paying for it. But not tomorrow. Tonight, at midnight. I don’t want to go in daylight. Tonight at midnight or it’s no deal.”
“It’s a deal,” Garrison said.
The house in Ybor City was comfortable. Matt Garth sat in front of the television set for two days. He drank beer from cans and smoked Cuban cigars. He also kept an eye on Fenton, who was some kind of a nut. Here they were, living it up big, eating good food and doing nothing much, and Fenton kept hopping around like a dog with fleas. He had a good thing going and he was too dumb to know it.
“Look,” Garth would tell him, “cool off, have a beer, calm down. This is fine, right? We wait until they take us to that plane. Then we do what we do. You scared or something?”
“I’m not scared.”
“Then cool it. Relax. We don’t go up against this Castro guy for a while yet. The longer we sit here, the better. There’s time.”
“No,” Fenton would say. “There’s no time at all. There’s very little time, Mr. Garth.”
“You could call me Matt.”
“Matt, then.”
“What do I call you? Earl?”
“Whatever you like,” Fenton said.
So Garth didn’t bother after that. He went on drinking cans of beer and smoking good Cuban cigars and thinking about Castro, the guy they were supposed to hit. It didn’t make sense to him but he wasn’t going to waste his time worrying about what made sense and what didn’t. That wasn’t the sort of thing he busted his mind over. He was an easygoing type, a guy who had more muscles than brains and knew it. He valued his brawn because plenty of guys with brains had paid him when they needed muscle to get a job done for them.
He worked for anyone who had the money to hire him, spent his earnings as soon as they came in, and drifted from one job to another without a worry. He had done a short bit for aggravated assault once in Dannemora, a few light stretches for drunk-and-disorderly and things like that, and since then he had learned to cool it when it came to the law. Outside of that, he had a simple and lazy moral and ethical code. He looked out for Number One, played it straight as a die with whoever was picking up the tab, and generally managed to come out of things right side up.
He had been a strike breaker, an enforcer, a bouncer, had done almost anything requiring the talents of somebody who could